I was walking with Reitha and Jai, admiring the scenery. Colourful fungal blooms waved in the gentle wind; small chitinous animals darted around the thick mycora stalks. Streams wound over rockeries of mimetite and amethyst and snowflake obsidian. Gau-gaus jagged through the air, their strange cries echoing their names, quick flurries of scale and tail and wing. We watched them pick the insects out of the sky with their small, needle-toothed jaws.
But what set this place apart from other areas of natural beauty down below was the light. There was a quality to it unlike any other. I had seen grottoes lit by luminescent fungi and translucent, glowing stalagmites, greens and blues in breathtaking harmony. I had visited a Ya'yeen installation where shinestones and flame refracted through gemstone lenses to create light patterns so beautiful I almost cried. But at home, light was muted, controlled, refracted and maximised. Light was our life. If ever it was entirely gone, we were lost.
This place glowed with the wild light of the world: the crazed, maddening, lethal fire of the suns. It was hard on the eyes, but it stirred old, old instincts, a cocktail of fear and desire. We had once lived in that light and been betrayed by it. Somewhere inside, deeper than thought could go, I wanted to feel those rays on my skin like my ancestors had. To turn my face up to sky and stand naked to the day.
Only naturalists and explorers and cartographers ever got to go up there with any regularity. It wasn't the kind of place that the untrained should wander in. But occasionally there were military skirmishes on the surface, and they were getting more frequent as the war dragged on. The generals on both sides were realising that a tortuous journey through bottleneck caverns underground might easily be circumvented by going over the top, if only they could learn to deal with the dangers. War on Callespa had always been a three-dimensional affair.
Rynn had stayed in the hotel; he had little interest in our excursion. If he felt the same pull as I did, he didn't show it. I had never been up to the surface, though I had been close several times. I didn't know if I had it in me to stand beneath a roofless sky, but I couldn't deny that I had a desire to find out.
We saw animals on our way, roaming free. Slender quadrupeds with long, delicate legs, covered head to foot in beige chitin. Squat things with domed silver exoskeletons that looked like smooth rocks when they retracted their feet and hid. Reitha pointed them out to Jai and named them. They were surface-dwelling species, made to weather the intolerable light of the suns.
I had drifted off into a peaceful daze, lulled by the scenery and the temperature, when Reitha cried out ahead of us. She had been following a small, hopping creature which rattled its carapace noisily whenever she got too near.
'Come here and see this!'
Jai responded to the delight in her voice. He was smiling even before he saw what it was. If it made her happy, it made him happy. I'd never seen him so besotted.
Reitha had found flowers. Small, delicate flowers, nodding in the breeze. They were huddled at the foot of a green and grey mycora. Tiny insects were flitting between the white cups.
'Can you believe it?'
I really couldn't. Flowers. I'd never seen them growing wild.
'They must have just enough light here to survive, but not enough to kill them. Do you know how delicate that kind of balance is?'
'They're beautiful,' Jai said, and by the reverence in his voice I knew he meant it.
'They've held on somehow,' she murmured.
It was hard to beat that, but Reitha and I had a surprise in store for Jai. Like me, he had never been to the surface; but unlike me, he had never even been near it. So when we were done with the flowers, we took him to the edge of the hotel grounds, where a sheer cliff dropped away, overlooking the chasm-fields. And there we showed him.
There was daylight here. Raw daylight, cutting down in blazing white beams through the cracks and fissures in the roof of the cavern. Sharp islands of illumination moved slowly across the floor and slid up the walls, inching their way over vineyards and fields and irrigation channels. Hundreds of men and women in sunsuits worked the vast expanse of cropland that had been cultivated at the bottom of the chasm. They kept to the shade, staying clear of the direct sun, tending fruits and other foods that could only be grown in ambient sunlight, but were too fragile to survive the unshielded rays for long. The air was heavy with drifting motes, feathery spores that glowed furiously in the light and suffused the atmosphere with a dreamlike haze. And it was warm: not the warmth of a fire or the warmth of deep, grumbling magma but the warmth of a star.
Jai was stunned. Not only by the scale of the chasm-fields, but because he had never seen the light of the suns until now. I watched him as he laid eyes on true light for the first time in his life, and I saw the tears gather and his throat close. There was nothing that could prepare you for it: millennia of instinct suddenly awakened by the sight, like a dam-burst inside. We were built to live beneath the sky, and our bodies remembered.
Reitha smiled and hugged herself to him. She appreciated his sensitivity, and I loved her for that. Maybe, just maybe, she could give him the confidence to step out of his father's shadow.
As if summoned by the thought, I saw Rynn striding over from the hotel, waving at me. There was another man with him.
'Stay here,' I told them. 'I won't be long.'
I headed back to meet Rynn and the newcomer half-way. By the time I got there I had already resigned myself to what was to come. He was a Caracassa man.
'Clan Caracassa requires your services,' he said, without preamble. It was the standard phrase they used. Never mentioning which member of Clan Caracassa required my services. No need to give away unnecessary information. A wise habit in the cut-throat world of the aristocracy.
I looked at Jai and Reitha, standing together, arm in arm in the glow of the light from the chasm-fields, lost in the vista. I really wanted this time with them, with Rynn. I really wanted it, and now I was being robbed, and that was the way life was.
I turned back to the agent, my eyes flat. 'What's the job?'
'There's a man in Mal Eista. His name is Gorak Jespyn. Your masters want him dead.'
36
I never was very domestic, but I liked to try. Every so often I was seized by the urge to be like a storybook mother, the kind of strange being that relished cleaning and cooking and ensuring that the cupboards were full. The urge never lasted long, and usually ended in a vague suspicion that I was the victim of some vast conspiracy, that these people only pretended to enjoy their lives in order to fool me into copying them. I just didn't have the temperament. It all seemed so pointless.
But still the urge would come back, and when I awoke this particular turn I was seized by a feeling of immense gratitude towards my husband and son, for no other reason than that they existed. In thanks, I would make them an elaborate breakfast. Just because.
Rynn ambled dozily out of the bedroom to find me cursing at the stove, surrounded by piles of chopped spores and attending to several spitting pans. He wandered over to the huge round window that dominated our living-space, yawned and scratched himself as he looked out over the Tangles from our vantage point high up in the Caracassa Mansions. His little routine. Then he came over to me, slid his arms around me from behind, and all my frustration faded away for a moment as I melted into him with a murmur of pleasure.